In silence sat the heavy truth,

A father’s face in shadowed youth,

The echoes of a voice once strong

Now rang as cruel, and cold, and wrong.

The man he knew, now old and grey,

had shaped a soul not quite his own.

And in his eyes, the tears would start—

Regret and rage tore through his heart.

He wept not just for wounds once made,

But for the mask he had portrayed,

For all the love he’d meant to give,

Yet learned too late how not to live.

Beside him, soft, you stayed so still,

No words to mend, no force of will—

Just presence there, a quiet light,

To guide him through the longest night.

You drove beneath the fading day,

Where golden fields in hush would lay,

The dogs asleep, the silence deep,

And sorrow slowed to let him weep.

The sun, it bowed behind the trees,

A hush fell on the grass and breeze,

And there you watched the deer slip by—

Two shadows ‘neath the blushing sky.

No answers came, nor comfort cheap,

Just ground to stand, and breath to keep,

And love not loud, but wide and still,

To hold him fast through pain’s long chill.

For healing grows in spaces bare,

Where someone stays, just simply there—

And in the dusk, he saw it true:

A gentler man was breaking through.